


drive all night through my hometown (drive your knife through my chest now)

by lackingother



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Angst, Batfamily Feels, Brotherly Love, Bruce Has Issues, Bruce tries, Dick Grayson is a good bro, Everyone Has Issues, Family Bonding, Foreign as it is, Gen, Hurt, It Gets Better, Jason Todd Has Issues, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Late Night Conversations, Love Is A Concept, Love and Loving, Panic Attacks, Protectiveness, References to Depression, Tags are low-key getting ahead of themselves but I'm gettin there, Tired people, Trauma, Trust Issues, Unhealthy Defense Mechanisms, a lot of fucking issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2019-06-13 18:45:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15370977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingother/pseuds/lackingother
Summary: In which Jason is badly hurt and tries toescaperemove himself from the Wayne Manor in the most (in)conspicuous ways possible. He is consistently foiled by the bat fam.[Implied/referenced character death(s), torture, depression, mental instability, PTSD, other mental health issues.]





	1. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title lifted from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XedrXl-aiBA

“Fuck,” is the first thing that flies from Jason’s parched mouth when he wakes up from a drug-induced coma (that has kept him under for approximately 2 days, 4 hours, and 27 seconds) to a room too big and too lavished for a hospital budget.

The first thing he realizes is his unfortunate degree of nudity-- _exposed down to hips, no hood, no domino_ \--with a flash of irritation.

The first thing he does, however-- _had to_ \--is breathe because the room is suddenly a very pretty casket he doesn’t want to be in.

He heaves-- _n_ _ot buried, not underground, not six feet under_ \--makes it past the choking sensation-- _not dead, alive, alive, you’re_ alive--remembers that he is different now-- _not Robin, Red Hood, you’re Red Hood, aka self-entitled badass, better fucking believe it asshole-_

Takes a shaky breath. Then another. And another. Till the feeling of strangulation and suffocation subsides with great reluctance and a vague semblance of calm filters through.

He’s sitting right above Batman’s nose, after all. He’s _secured._

At least they had the decency to put him in a guest room.

The thought alone dissipates any remaining residue of his attack. An old, hollow weariness settles in its place.

He has to go.

Jason knows they would have cameras watching, listening. Hell, they'd probably noticed the change in his breathing from the moment he woke. The raging in his ears recede; he hears the heart monitor--pulse after rapid pulse. If he could hear it, they could.

He has to move, now.

He nudges his arms, feels for his legs and is somewhat relieved that, at the least, nothing seemed broken. It’s probably the most promising aspect of his experience so far. Jason begins pulling himself up and ow _,_ _ow,_ right, _at the least,_ never the  _fuck_ mind _._

An exasperated groan leaves him and he runs a quick hand down his torso. Wires, electrodes. Jason finds his ribs bandaged, the sudden jerk he’d made coaxing out something wet and metallic. He curses quietly. He tries shifting; pain spears its way through him; another curse, louder, this time directed at his stupid ass.

 _No guns, no armor, no hood, half-naked and damaged_ in what he considers  _enemy territory_.

Great.

Of all the things he could’ve fucked up on, it’s _this_.

 

\---

 

_Two nights ago._

 

Jason choked, salt and filth skimming on his wound, and it took considerable effort to keep himself from screaming into an endless volume of weight and water.

 _God, fuck, jesus, christ,_ he thought, weak and furious, before finally settling on  _shit_ ,  _it wasn’t supposed to be like this._

He thought he had left the suicidal _aka hero_ tendencies back in the grave. If clawing out of one didn’t kill it, it should’ve when Jason pulled the trigger.

The world just loves to prove him wrong, doesn’t it?

He had broken up a minor gunfight and was in the process of disrupting another when the distress call patched through. Nightwing, from Gotham bay. Jason was only a couple streets away from the harbor--he figured he’d drop in for a courtesy visit. Couldn’t say he missed blue bird’s mug, but he did prefer it relatively intact. Call it professional concern.

Professional concern goes to shit when Jason found Dick.

The acrobatic wonder was trying to fend off seven very pissed-off looking men with fists duller than Damian’s bedside manners.

He squinted at the scene, gauging the limp in Dick’s struggling body and the raging fire in the backdrop. A grin streaked across his face, and he was admittedly a little proud of the man, for the slightest of moments. Blowing up buildings (and the occasional person)  _is_ pretty therapeutic--a personal preference.

Jason took two before charging in, ramming a face with his steel-toed boot and another with a kevlar fist. The weight, the bone and skin surrendering to the shape of his knuckles, was a pleasant feeling. Made a guy feel capable. Guns rattled off somewhere and bullets lost themselves in the open air. He laughed under the hood, a touch of pleasure and mania in the sharp static.

“Big bird’s a bit far from the nest!” Jason called over the sound of fractured craniums as Red Hood bashed heads in with gun butts and steel boots.

“And why are you here?” Nightwing took down one and dodged another, clumsily. Jason caught sight of a fine slit of blood and skin at Dick’s thigh. Bullet graze.

“Rude,” started Jason--a punch, a kick to the shins, and a shout--“your ass is the one that needed saving!”

A distant snort, then a laugh. “Aw, didn’t think you cared, Little Wing!”

“Seriously debating against it,” Jason answered, half to himself, and tripped a guy running for Dick. He gave him the boot before turning to see that the last man standing had taken to attacking the ~~weaker~~ weakened vigilante. Jason cocked an unimpressed eyebrow at his brother’s lazy attempts at hit and run.

“Safeword’s please!” He yelled, and Dick lashed out with a particularly vicious fist. The man keened over by his fellow associates.

“Handled. Myself. Perfectly. Fine,” the man with a bullet wound amongst other things said, or grumbled, as he carried himself (painfully) slowly up and over all the unconscious bodies.

“I can see that,” snips Jason, cataloguing the unpleasant condition of Dick’s approaching figure. Some wounds had been hard to see before--the cuts on his cheek, the lines down his arm, was that another at his neck?--the injuries nearly hidden in folds of skin and kevlar. Injuries that shouldn’t have happened in motion. The wounds would’ve been longer, deeper, more jagged and less clean. Dick would’ve had to been rendered immobile, to have all those nicks in all the wrong places.

“You were tortured,” was the realization, and the question.

“No.”  

Dick said it too quickly, too assuredly, for Jason to believe, and the younger lifted and pressed a deliberate finger to the cut at the older’s neck. An inch off the artery. Two and fifty-four centimeters away from a bloody end. He applied pressure. Dick winced.

“You protect your neck when you move,” Jason said, slowly, digesting the words cautiously, so that he may filter out the growing anger. “You weren’t moving when this”--he tapped lightly on the opened skin, smudges of new and old red coming away--“happened, dickie boy.”

His brother didn’t quite meet his eyes, staring past Jason's ear, but he did eventually, the blue dulled with a tired awareness. “They hit me with something.”

“For how long?” Jason bit at his lip, canines digging into the soft undersides, a sort of inadvertent metaphor to keep his emotions in check. Was it working? No. The pain gave him a focus, though.

A slow, slow exhale crescents Dick’s chest. “Few hours.” 

There’s a long pause before the other man can speak. “Okay. Do you need B?”

“No. Not him”--a deep sigh rose into the air between them--“but...can you stay? Jay?” The request was simple. And small. Doable.  

Jason stared at the unblemished blue of Nightwing’s wrist. He nodded. Dick reached for him then, and Jason let him, because he understood the need, the need for touch and warmth and silent understanding, so he let him, mouth a quiet line between a storm of _I’m sorry_ s and a hellfire of curses.

He was taller than Dick now.

He stood at least a head above the older man, and he stood there now, seeing over his brother’s shoulder, reliving the few moments of banter and bicker they had exchanged during his time as Robin. He remembered Dick’s gloating and his own justified annoyance.

 _I’m still growin’, you turkey!_ He’d said, angrily, to an incredibly self-satisfied Richard Grayson, who had proudly worn his lame v-suit, all cocked up and shit, the tall (useless) fringes the picture of nincompoop. The outburst had been somewhat of a promise, Jason noticed now, and he smiled a little at the younger version of him, because he--they--had kept it. One of the rare few they ever did.

He had enjoyed spending time with Dick. He'd enjoyed being Robin, enjoyed swinging into the black sea of Gotham's night and waking up to Sunday blueberry tarts and sleeping late on occasional movie nights. He loved so much. He loved too much. Growing up and dying tends to give you a slightly different frame of mind.

Dick’s body leaned against his, weight an anchor to them both. A reminder.

Jason thought about saying sorry or thank you or both when he saw the glint of a gun and his body moved, instinctively, to protect. Like a flare. Like the fifteen-year-old boy he once was. _Martyr._

Self-sacrifice must be in my blood, was the idle, vaguely amused thought, as he toppled headlong into the water, his name a scream after him.

 

\---

 

His gear is nowhere in the room. Figures they would make everything harder for him. When do they not?

As a notion of respect, though more of a nod, he takes a cursory glance at the large, unnecessary window to his left, to pacify the raging child in him who still wants to climb out windows and rebel in the night. The only difference, now? A gaping .35 Remington wound in his stomach.

Old-fashioned way it is. He would have to take a backdoor out. He silently hopes that he still knows the place well enough to find one.

Jason manages one foot off the bed before feeling the rush of nausea. Whatever had put him under-- _f_ _uck_ , it’s some strong shit. He grabs at the bed, barely catching himself on his journey to the silky, clean and carpeted floor. The heart monitor goes haywire before he reaches up and rips the sensors from his chest; his knees flatter the crisp, spotless fur for the briefest moment. 

A fun idea: it’s this place making him feel like puking. The absolute familiarity of it.

Even this room bleeds with reminders _._

The wood under his feet is still the same dark, laden color from all those years ago--never once changed and always polished--a tradition, a homage to the ancestors that stare from walls and painting frames. The lounging sofa on his left is a sister to all the other pieces of elaborate furnishings scattered across the mansion. The style of it all another repetitive pattern.

Jason’s brain tingles and writhes at the mere memory of his bare feet on floorboards; at the quiet sounds of the Manor--creaking, opening, waking in the light of morning--and how its occupants were just the same. Silent and fragile.

His hand catches onto something cold and rigid and he seizes it, holds on. IV pole, he assumes, when he feels the tube along his arm jerk. He uses it for leverage, pushes himself upward. His body rights itself with great difficulty, and, breathing harshly, heart an angry elephant in his chest, Jason limps onward, stand in tow.

He really hates himself right now.

He’d fucked up an _easy_ job, fucked up his body in the process, and compromised basically all his operations just by being _here._

Jason would groan more if he wasn’t trying to keep a lid on the pain. His teeth grind together, sounds managing to stay suppressed back in his throat.

He is two shuffles away from the bed.

At this rate, he would never get out.

A traitorous longing sidles its way in. He throws a sidelong glance at the bed, sees how appealing it is at the very moment, and gives a half-hearted shrug.

Then, he’d die trying. Have the last laugh.

Jason feels some wicked satisfaction at that. The first time he died, he'd gone unwillingly. He was Joker’s statement--the _love_ to the letter. Now, he could make his own--mark the plush carpets with red; ruin the neat walls with nails and DNA. It’d be a small victory, but a _victory_.

He’d die laughing with a mouth full of blood.

He wouldn’t die like that, in that--in that helpless, hopeless, desperate way again, on the ground, bound by broken ribs, staring down time. Red a single digit execution. His breaths the only countdown.

Not this time. Not ever.

And he’s about to go do just that when a strong arm pulses across his chest and holds him there.

Jason gasps at the sudden lack of air, already pitching forward, ready to buck off the weight, his first instinct to _fight_ dying in his veins when he sees the bandages and the blue.

“Dick, let _go._ ” He hisses, half out of malice, half out of annoyance, and grudgingly,half out of concern-

There are a lot of halves.

“Yeah, and let you nail me in the crotch? _No.”_

Jason actually smiles at that. Or the memory of it.

“I can still reach with my fist,” is his airy reply, angling out an arm to add emphasis. He really considers doing it until Dick’s other arm comes around his chest, and suddenly they are doing a thing called a _hug_ and Jason almost gags. This time, his immediate reaction is to wriggle the hell out.

“Let, go, fuckin’, dickhead,” he snarls each word with a jerk, keenly aware of how the hole in his midsection gapes larger with every ill-advised movement and how he _really doesn’t care._

But Dick doesn’t, his arms tightening till Jason can’t really squirm, much less twist. He can only still in the hug turned hold, feeling stunned at his incredible lack of strength and how it wasn’t quite so for his brother. Jason feels Dick’s breath at his nape.

“Sorry,” is what he gets for his efforts.

“Don’t want it,” Jason spits, automatic.

“Thank you,” Dick offers instead, simple and sincere.

Jason falters, deflating in his brother’s arms. His weight strains heavy against Dick; his head falls just a little--an imperceptible defeat.

“I hate this.” He mutters to no one in particular, knowing all of them could hear him.

“I know.” Dick replies, and then the younger is being guided back to bed, a cautionary arm at his waist.

“Tuck me in and I’ll punch you,” warns Jason, earnestly, as he falls back into the cushions, cringing at the pain that whips through him. He swallows another moan. Being careful with his body had never been a priority--the man notes, dully, the relevance (and prevalence) of old habits. 

Dick hums, blue eyes on Jason the whole time, clearly watching and waiting for the pain because in the next moment he’s propping the other man up and redressing the wound with practiced movements.  

Jason doesn’t resist. He’s exhausted. Fatigue had fallen over him, an awkward weight on his limbs, tethering him to the gentle accommodations of the bed. The state of it all really should alarm him more but at this point, the man is kind of done giving any further damns.  

Sitting back and doing nothing for a change does give Jason a chance to evaluate the other man’s condition, one he takes without a thought. Dick is relatively unscathed. Nothing permanent; the wounds had been shallow. Most of the cuts have faded into dulled red lines. The only wound of concern is the bullet graze--Jason recoils when long, cool fingers get too close, relaxes when they withdraw--and that seems to be healing well, judging by his brother's gait.

He's been out for a while, then. He wonders if Dick had reported his torture. Maybe that explains why they sent him, of all people. To take care of this. Dick would have been one of the more...willing.

His eyes flicker away and closes as he casts off tiny bits of consciousness and unnecessary thought. His body is a map he usually never wants to look at. But he does. Self-examination comes simply this time, without uninvited insecurities.

 _Nausea, low blood pressure, elevated heart and respiratory rate, laceration in the abdomen, running a fever and generally feeling like shit. Increasing urge to puke._ He has the dubious worry that if he does, he’d regurgitate his guts. A bigger recognition trails slowly behind the concern--far too slowly.

“Infection?” Jason says, and his voice suddenly sounds a lot weaker than before.

Dick hums in answer, eyes flitting up to meet his brother’s. Fear. “Sepsis. It's not too severe, mild. There’s some nasty stuff in the bay.”

Jason wants to laugh, but he's having trouble with breathing. “A blood infection? Dear brother mine, that _is_ severe _._ ” The jab is winded, small, and everything Jason wishes wasn't. He doesn't get a say.

The older is quiet. Jason knows why Dick’s fingers had felt so cool--he is the one too hot. He is the one hurt, again, _always again_.

The conversation dies. It’s only the sound of bandages rustling and (his) breaths coming short that keeps the room from complete silence.

“Alfred was terrified.” Dick breaks the stillness in half with the nervous noise. Jason doesn’t startle, lest his wound protest, and settles into a dim, unaffected stare.

“He isn't here,” points out Jason. Flat.

 _Bruce isn't, either._ It's unspoken and strangely obvious.

He looks, absentmindedly, to the bookshelf far off in the corner, sheltering dozens of spotless spines, all sophisticated in their untouched perfection. No one has read those in decades, Jason thinks. I should try one sometime, is the other, more unassuming thought.

“ _He_ helped save your life,” corrects his brother, next to him. Jason isn’t sure which of the two Dick is referring to. Maybe both? Maybe he should just ask. He doesn’t.

The sentence hangs. A pause. Hesitation. That’s normal, Jason muses, whenever it comes to him. Who would help someone who wouldn’t help themselves?

“They're just...waiting.”

A hand touches Jason's shoulder and draws his attention away from the shelves and to the soft expression that wrinkles the fine lines in his brother's face.

“For my end?”, is the response, almost instinctive in its cold irony. It breathes like a taunt, but it falls on them all with equal sincerity. _Martyr._

Sadness flickers over Dick’s face before disappearing into something pinched and neutral. His brother doesn't withdraw, his palm resting almost politely on the crest of Jason’s shoulder.

“No. For your patience. You aren’t exactly the picture of tolerance.” Dick tilts his head a little. A faint smile curls his split lip. “Guess they figured I was the better person to handle that.”

“You’ve always been better,” agrees the other, indulging in the wordplay with a crooked smirk before rolling his shoulder away from the persistent touch. “I do hope I’m not giving them the pleasure of my survival, though. Hate to know what _that_ does on the conscience”--he looks up, biting in his smile, bitter in his eyes--“I really do appreciate the gesture, but we all know it's more for courtesy than it is for little ol’ me.”

Jason stares into the camera, blinking red at him in its ceiling perch, as he finishes, eyes slow and deliberate when it peels away from the glass visage.

“I saved the favorite, after all.”

Dick bristles, rigid agitation in the movement.

“You are never gonna let that go, are you.” His voice is a weary one.

Jason shrugs, hiding the shudder of pain he feels down his debilitated side when he does. “I have daddy issues, Dick, did I not make that clear in my being an orphan.” The comment is utterly inert, and vicious--as easy as a gesture.

“Too bad you didn’t lose the salt in the water,” mutters Dick, his head dipping into his hands. A sigh filters through the wrapped fingers. Tired. Weak. Indicative of his probably regretting ever agreeing to convince his younger brother to stay put in this godforsaken place.

Jason relishes in the old hate and anger for a small eternity before forcibly shuttering them away, for the sake of a single shred of tenderness. It’s hard, burying things that rip, fight and claw.

It's hard, loving when you’ve never been given the luxury.

But the ache has dulled and he’s weary of hurting. Pain has always been an endless demonstration of intimacy, filling his insides when food didn't; assuming his heart where trust hadn't.

He’s tired.

Is that enough? Bargaining for something other than bitterness to occupy the emptiness in his broken chest? 

"You should rest." Jason finally says, and it is a quiet murmur next to his heartbeat. “I-”

He stops when the next words find him as easily as his taunts. Dick’s eyes are on him. He closes his eyes and breathes. Tries not to choke on whatever he is promising. It screams inside him, violent in his throat, the words, the vulnerability _._

“I will stay, Dick.” Another breath. It sounds out like a rasp, but deals like a blow. “I’ll stay. I won’t go anywhere, okay? So go rest.” A beat. “Can’t have you dying when I just saved your ass.”

It’s like a promise. Like, but not quite. It’s just the best thing he’s got to give right now--a peace offering.

He opens his eyes to see Dick wavering between an demonstration of pure restraint and a breakdown of pure relief. It ends in the latter, as it usually does. The older man is smiling, a disarming grin so dumbly wide it sends a raw ache tumbling through him and Jason finds himself smiling back, the void subsiding just like that. Painlessly. Simply. Oh so simply.

Motion reenters his system in the way his body is drawn forward, to another, to a body as firm and beaten and scarred as his. This time, Jason feels no need to defend himself against it. He doesn't fight, and stranger still, he doesn't run. He sinks into it, the open warmth. Security staves off the cold, the broken hopes. Dick hugs harder, breathing little _thank you_ s into Jason’s hair.

He believes it.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, my name is soy and i am going to try my best to break your hearts.


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He loved so much. He loved too much. Growing up and dying tends to give you a slightly different frame of mind._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: heavy content.

He has simulated this at some point. At many points.

To open his eyes for Bruce to finally be there.

Jason has stopped expecting. It’s taken a decade, but he’s done it. There would be a cold, open space next to him forever, like that void in his chest he’s had ever since he came alive for the second time.

It’s like this world--grey and unmoving.

Sometimes, anger flits across it like a misguided spark; movement, bursting at the seams of his mind. On bad days, loneliness leaves his insides to rot, like fingernails and teeth, eating at the edges of an emptiness that is no longer a tame thing between palms. Regret in him is a pair of hands, reaching out to suffocate him, or to stab his eyes out. Everything empties after that, for a while. He enters limbo. He hangs upside down, or upright, depending on how long he has been operating without sleep.

Jason thinks about what words he’d say, then, when he crashes somewhere high and stays there till the sun breaks. It’s the only time he’d even allow himself to think it, any of it. He stitches thoughts together from the patchwork that his brain has become, forming each letter with the delicacy of a butcher.

_I know you love me, Bruce. You loved me, and still did nothing./_

_You look at me like a scar./ Am I the ghost of your haunted house?/_

_I was your tragedy./_

_I’m sorry./ Didn’t work out./ Never will./_

_Thank you & goodbye. _

He thinks it, mouths it, and when he feels a hand settle on his, light and warm and gentle, he imagines saying it all, his lips suddenly a dam he wills to open.

His lips do not, and his eyes stay shut. Jason doesn’t speak. Bruce sits by his side for a long time, the hand a consistent presence on his knuckles, callouses rough against the tender undersides of his wrist.

When he leaves, Jason remembers him as a sound, a ripple in the silent room.

A wisp of a dream.

 

\---

 

Alfred is the one who wakes him.

“Wow,” Jason says, when he finally cracks open an wary eye to watch the butler spread a premium meal of nutrient glory before him, smiling as he quips, “serving breakfast in _bed_ , Alfred? I must’ve died.”

Alfred, ever the impeccable man, doesn’t rise at the comment. He merely snaps open the curtains and lets the light sear Jason’s eyes, instead.

"Thank that hole in your gut for it, Master Jason.” Alfred says a moment later, a touch after the younger man finishes a torrent of verbal obscenities.

“And the infection,” adds Jason, hissing it, before somewhat resentfully sitting himself up and taking the least offending item from the tray. He eyes the glass of orange juice for a good second. Tastes it for another. It has been freshly strained, the drink rich with just the right dash of pulp and sugar. He feels the small tug at his mouth, a disbelieving thing, at that--at this creeping semblance of normality. 

Alfred is adjusting the pillows behind his back. “The sepsis, sir? As if you haven’t contracted death enough.” The steady voice is not steady enough to hide the unamused scoff Jason had learned to hear all those years ago. He smiles a little harder behind the rim of glass (hopelessly, this time)--and in the picture of fractures, he seems to hurt a little less.

God, he’s missed this.

Jason drinks the rest of the juice. There is silence while he finishes. The throb of his sore throat retreats at the cool liquid; nausea does him a solid and follows suit. He eyes the rest of the tray--a spoon, a fork, a bowl of porridge, fruit, and more fruit. Appealing, putting aside the fact he'd probably spew the food right back out again. Jason pokes at it anyway, to convey some interest. Or disinterest. He thinks about Dick, for a short moment. 

“How are you feeling, sir?”, comes the inevitable question.

He doesn't consider it. “Like I’ve been shot and infected against my will.”

“Indeed,” and Jason can practically hear the unimpressed eyebrow raise.

When he looks up, Alfred is standing beside him, hands cupped in front, gloved palms over the other--a bit of nervous gesture, Jason has found. A finely disguised one. The manner is held regally, as elegant as the tail of his perfectly ironed suit.

It's a superpower, he decides.

Morning light pours from the exposed window, giving clearance to the dark shadow Alfred usually assumes. Bags line the old man’s eyes. It accents the worn lines in his face, tears away some of the illusion that they all wear like a veil.

“Bruce worked you hard yesterday?” Jason asks, faintly. It’s meant to be a passing question, one for idle conversation, but Alfred’s eyes harden just a little bit and Jason already feels himself building walls.

Self-preservation, check.

“No, Master Jason,” is the solemn beginning, “he did not. You did.”

It’s not quite an accusation, that. (For once.) It’s a weary statement of fact, typical of the Wayne Butler. Jason knows better.

He did not. _Not this time._ You did. _And it aged me beyond my years._

“You were scared." Jason hears the lectures, sees the anxious furrow of that wrinkled brow. Remembers the times spent waiting by beds, and the times spent in one.

“Yes,” comes the simple agreement, after a delicate pause.

Yes. _Scared for your life._ Yes. _Scared to lose you again._ Yes. _Scared for what it’d do._

Chirps harmonize outside the window, little accents of soft grey flitting amongst the green. Birds tell the time; they only ever sang like that around eight. He remembers. Usually, he wishes he doesn’t, because it reminds Jason of school, and school was the one thing he had at thirteen years that had given him hope. It had given him packed lunches and Father Days and afternoons of algebra two. It had given him exasperatedly fond looks--“Jaylad, did you finish your homework?”--and sick days--“Crime can wait for one night, Jay”--and undivided attention--“See? You multiply and add...that’s synthetic division.”

It had given him a father and a family.

A father he no longer had, and a family he no longer needed.

“Sorry,” Jason says, and it’s faraway. He doesn’t know what the apology is for--for turning out wrong, or turning out like this. Interchangeable.

“Don’t be.” Alfred’s voice is unassuming, and it prods apart the thoughts starting to collect at the pit of Jason’s mind. A light touch at his knee centers him. “Master Jason, apologies only work if you've done something wrong.” The words soften with the gentle tone that delivers it. Jason looks at the old man.

 _I shot Tim to hurt you, Bruce, and Dick_ , he thinks about saying.

Or _, I rigged the Batmobile and I was going to press the button_.

Or _, I resented you, resented you all, and I'm still not sure if I ever won't._

Or _, I didn't save my mom._

Or, _I didn't wait for Bruce in Ethiopia._

Or _, I wanted to be loved and died for it._

He thinks it, because of course he does. Then smiles, because carving into the pain is what he does best.

“Didn’t get the memo, Alf?” He says, hurting in his nature, “Jason Todd, the local screw-up”--a hand goes up, waves in the general direction of the shitshow that is his body--"not really news anymore, is it?" It's weak. Rhetorical. Vindictive. Bare, removed even from the hard sarcasm that always seems to hold his speech ransom.

He thinks he sees a slight crease at Alfred’s forehead, the anatomy of a retort playing at the ends of the old man’s mouth--and turns away then, because he is experienced enough in rejection (or resignation?) to know how this all ends, as it always will; in silence.

Jason lets his eyes fall back to the untouched platter of food, seeing years of travel on his hands and the layers of dirt beneath his nails beside the infallible design of silverware. The refined cutlery, the soft mattresses, the breakfast smells--they had never meant anything to him, other than an elaborate lie. There'd be a catch, the younger him understood, an end to this all. People aren't good. Miracles don't happen. He didn't--doesn’t--believe in strokes of luck, only in another’s mistake.

And mistake he is. And end did it all. The lie, and his life _._ Interchangeable. 

Jason’s knee is still warm.

At some point, Alfred had moved away--retracted. Maybe the butler had been repelled by something in his voice, in the words that leave Jason's mouth distorted, wrong. Does the old man see ghosts, Jason wonders, ghosts in the lines that have tempered his face, deepened it? Imagine _has-been_ s and _could-have_ s with every glance, met by eyes too callous to be a child’s, too hollow to belong to the boy who had lived an age ago?

Jason stares at the polished platter and hates it for a fleeting moment, for showing the face that stares almost deliberately back to him.

Does Alfred still see that kid in him? The one that had leapt off high places? The one that had jumped, and fell, fell, fell?

Does he see the man Jason could have been?

It must be measured, the way Alfred shifts from silence, the way the old man moves to place a gloved hand upon the crown of Jason’s head. It's a careful movement; fingers test hair, asking for affirmation. A long moment passes as Jason struggles to dissolve the tension from his shoulders, from his head-- _I’m not a boy anymore, I don't deserve this, do you mean this_ \--before he finally nods, an acknowledgment that weighs, lulls him under.

The old man pats him then, hand gracing down the side of his skull. Alfred leans Jason against the finely tailored side of the butler wear. The younger feels the stern material at his forehead, cheek--not frigid like leather nor coarse like cheap cloth, but reasonably firm. Softness is a faint memory in the tough fabric.

Fitting, Jason thinks, for the man who is capable of putting Batman to shame with a single withering glare and the one who is equally capable of soothing years of pain with a well-timed blueberry tart.

Sunday blueberry tarts were the best.

Alfred had always been the hand at his head, the one that lingered when Batman had left, the one that eased the pressure left by Bruce’s kevlar hand on his young, gangly shoulder.

He had never been one to walk away.

“Tea?”, the old man would always ask to the emptiness of the Batcave, the question always the first Jason would hear after several hours of self-imposed exile in some hidden corner of the underground depths.

“No,” he’d answer, voice ringing everywhere, and that would be that. Alfred would go on polishing spoons and forks on the dissection table, and maybe whet dinner knives. Jason might occasionally clamber down (or up) to join him, pulling out class assignments from secret compartments to work on. Or not. Alfred never searched for him. Never expected him, either. It hadn’t mattered. Alfred’s watch would chime exactly six--the sound would reverberate throughout the cave--and they’d pick themselves up from wherever and whatever and migrate to the kitchen, to cook dinner together.

Feasts meant bad days. Bad days meant furious egg whisking and angry vegetable mutilation at the cutting board. On those days, Alfred would let Jason decide the cuisine and he often opted for Chinese, because many dishes required dicing and something about the knife and cutting, cutting, cutting sated him.

They’d make enough for a dozen people.

Generous portions would be left to cool, before being neatly packaged and delivered to their respective doors.

Jason smiles against Alfred’s suit, when he sees Batgirl’s knowing grin in the Batcave, countered only by the cold severity of the screens, as she passes over the washed tupperwares and says, “Put jalapenos in my dad’s next time, I have a bet to win”. Then they’d sneak out and punch people. Dick sometimes participated, usually per Alfred’s request to get their stoplight asses home before 2 a.m. Which typically happened, since classes started in the morning and they liked going. There was one occasion Jason hadn't made on time, though. Sneaking back into the Manor ten minutes past curfew _unnoticed_ was maybe the single most stressful experience Jason had had since...practically ever.

He misses it.

The hand at his head, the Sunday blueberry tarts, the occasional movie nights, the breakfast smells, the kitchen chaos, the ceaseless exasperation, the shared smirks, the easy conversation, the effortless coordination, the uncomplicated quibbles, the aimless wanderings, the nights out on rooftops, and sometimes _always,_ the hand at his shoulder.

He has always missed it, and he’d never tell.

Jason Peter Todd would never name that, that insidious warmth in his chest; that hate, for him, derives from love; that he has a horrible hate for this place, this place where his life had begun, this place where there are memories laying around like discarded backup plans and blunted batarangs.

He had been fifteen, and he’d had it all.

“Jay,” calls the boy back.

It isn't Alfred. Alfred never calls him by name, not without the formalities that he had never grown to like. Has. Has. Has never grown to like. He is still legally dead, isn’t he. He is still that memorial _the failure encased in glass_ just downstairs, isn’t he.

“Hey, Jay, look at me.”

Never Jay-lad, never Jay, never lad, never  _son._

 _“Jason--_ you're not breathing, you need to breathe.”

He had only been fifteen years-old. He only just finished his final paper. ‘ _Why do Traumatized Survivors Blame Themselves?_ ’. He’d considered the word choice, contemplated between the words _victim_ and _survivor_. Victim implies inevitable helplessness; survivor, an endless fight. He’d chosen survivor, because people were either that, or dead. 

He had been one month away from finishing tenth grade.

“Oh God, breathe, breathe, please _breathe-”_

He had wanted to take philosophy in senior year; discuss midlife crises at sixteen, debate the idea that God has plans for everyone, and dispute the fact that His plan for the fifteen year-old street boy who had become more than he ever could be had been a crowbar, a bomb, and a woman _who he called mother_ to set it all off-

The rip in the air brings him back just milliseconds before he feels the burn at his cheek, before he comprehends the pain like a chemist and opens his mouth to let in the air, to choke on it like a drowning man might.  

“-Jay-”

He does choke, but he does breathe, eating the air, swallowing it like water.

The skin at his face ignites, and it could’ve been a fire on his cheek but it grounds him just the same as a punch might. Tangibility plunges back onto the spectrum of existence. The body becomes his, a returning--a slow, slow awakening.

Jason breathes--it feels as if the world is burning to pieces in him--and suddenly there is no longer a sea to devour, a fire he must feed.

His eyes rip from the tirade of terror, sees nothing but darkness before he understands his hands and realizes he is using them for shelter and takes them away-

Alfred is no longer at his side.

His head is no longer against Alfred's side.

The mattress is not soft. The mattress is not malleable underneath him. There’s something solid against his back--not cushions, nor pillows, but hard, unforgiving _wood_.

He is no longer on the bed.

He is no longer burning, but he is numbing, bleeding, decaying. He is bleeding.

The smell cues him, the one that soaks the room and erases the pristine disinfectant from the air. The one that rises off him like a prelude to death.  

Jason finds the trail first, seeing red in light, and follows it back to where he should have been--on the fucking bed.

The mattress dips and creases at where he had been; the sheets are flung aside, urgency clear in the knocked over pillows and the missing body that should’ve been tucked away still, still oriented in that sphere of immunity. Another collapsed alignment; another dead end. Jason had been there, and now he is not.

The bed is fine. The rest of the room is not.

Ripped wires litter the floor. Machinery lay, toppled, on their sides. The heart monitor is dead, the glass smashed from the fall. A bowl spills its contents just shy of the bed, the accompanying platter laying across the room, a dent high in the wall above it. The IV stand is collapsed, wheels still turning, the untucked syringe working out liquid. The bedside table had been spared, and perhaps too that generic painting of autumn trees and sunset sidewalks that hangs high and indignant above the ruin. Is that dusting of deep red from dying leaves, blazing suns, or the open veins in Jason’s arm?

He had gotten his wish, is the only thought that strikes true in his loaded brain.

Sliced strawberries and peeled oranges glow luminescent amongst the rest of the red, the copper blush that trips across the carpet, tracks over the polished floor, pools at his bare feet.

It's a murder scene, almost, only he is not dead.

Now, Jason really wishes he is, because he is alive enough to see the pure anguish in his brother's face and the pure heartbreak in Alfred’s, as they stand three feet from him, hands up in a notion of surrender that looks less of a peace offering and more like a pleading.

Mouths are moving. He reads them--a reflex, a conditioned habit that, for the immediate second, Jason is actually grateful for, because he can’t hear words over the roar of his heart.

The old man begins to shape a name  _his_ before there is a hand, a glance, and Jason thinks it’s understanding that passes, silently, between the two bodies before him. Dick moves; he waits.

 _Hey_ , his brother says--or does he whisper it, scream it?--eyes such a vibrant blue in the light and red it’s almost unnerving, _I’m here, Jay, I’m here, okay,_ _you a_ re _okay now,_ we _are_ here _, we_ aren’t _leav_ ing _you._ The split lips move, snatches of sound catching in his ears, filtering in and out.  _You are_ safe here _, I_ swear _, Jay, can_ you hear _me, oh--_ realization widens his mouth-- _you are_ reading my lips _, okay_ \--Dick is smiling just a little, wrinkling his eyes, relief in the scrunch of his chin-- _blink_ twice if you _are okay_ with me _coming_ closer.

Jason closes his eyes, opens them, does it again. Dick moves forward. Slowly. Jason keeps his eyes on the split mouth, watches sadness and fear and apprehension play across them by the second. Sees the heavy heart in the way his brother tries to keep smiling, and fails.

Hey, _this okay, blink twice_ if not, _I’ll stop--_ he doesn’t blink, and Dick doesn’t stop-- _okay,_ Jay, _I’m here,_ I won’t _ever_ leave, _we will_ be here _, okay._

It’s like wading back to the surface; Dick’s voice is the sky, and he must reach it _he has always tried_ and when Dick speaks again, Jason hears it, resounding-

“Little Wing.”

Voice a quiver in the air between them.

Dick had been whispering.

It crashes on him all the same. The fibre of his brother’s sound, the faint and fast breaths that leave the husk that is his own chest.

Jason stares and doesn’t notice the way he starts to sway, the way he automatically goes to his knees _so when his body falls it falls less_ , the way his hands try to save his reopened gut  _but his hands are shaking too hard to help him live_.

“Jay,” comes again, rushes at him, the word like a candle, the voice like a thread set alight, and that is as far as Dick goes before Jason drags an arm up into the air across from them. When does this chasm end? He notices now how obviously his body wants to fall apart, because it has been trying for far too long.

He has been trying for far too long, for someone who isn’t there anymore.

Jason tries to speak. Notices his throat and the voice that would rather not.

_Help._

_I’d rather._

_Die._

And the words do, laying themselves down on the slab of his tongue.

They do.

One doesn’t.

“Dick,” Jason chokes out, a final lifeline. He hates it. Hates how it scrapes raw out of his throat like his throat is cut glass and his voice bleeds and breaks trying to leave it, how his voice sounds _so fucking broken_ , _how long has he been like this-_

“I’m here,” someone finally says.

This voice does not belong to Bruce. This voice does not belong to broken hopes.

Hands come around him, and Jason feels the worn quality of the fingers, understands the wear of Dick’s knuckles against his bare, numbed skin. Warmth touches him. Lost blood, he thinks.

The cold is good. Jason takes comfort from it, relishes in it, in the fact that he must _finally, absolutely_ look deathly. He hopes so. His heart has been ticking, counting down since the moment a pulse travelled across the world and touched his body and decided to bring breath into his empty chest. Jason wonders now, can they see?

He wants to puke.

He wants to leave, but more than that, Jason wants to omit, to dissipate the clots still in his blood, the bullets still loaded in his brain.

The Pit never did cause insanity _._

“Get away,” Jason whispers, screaming it, “get the fuck away from me, I'm about to-” and he vomits, or tries to, but nothing comes out and he is only heaving, expelling the air in him that hasn't burned yet, that hasn't been choked out by the endless succession of rock and rubble.

 _Why am I still alive,_ Jason thinks, just as he remembers, _this is the part I die._

And maybe he really is, on this floor that is not concrete but wood, on this floor where his footprints must lay hushed and unspoken like rusted piano keys. The silence is just another casket to bury himself in, the destruction another extension of his pain.

His pain, finally apart from him in the form of blood and chaos.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jason didn't die in the blast, technically. He died of suffocation in the aftermath, underneath the rubble. This is noted by Bruce in _Death in the Family_ , when he searches for Jason's body.


	3. It was broken before I got here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It shouldn’t matter, the way he wakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FIVE ETERNITIES LATER...
> 
> y'all thought I was dead and you wEre RIGHT but i'm kinda back now. No Promises, but I'm pretty adamant about this fic.

When he thinks about dying, he thinks it might be something like this.  

A wounded space. Death like getting lost, somewhere. He still thinks it might be something like walking through the halls of an museum after hours, expecting God in all the violated bodies and stone hearts. He still thinks he will not be alone.

He is wrong.

There is only horror, a sudden unrelenting grip, and it’s like everything at once has taken hold of him--because he _knows_. He knows, and he is paralyzed in the absolute belief, like a clay molding taken and broken down to reveal the raw bits that do not include happiness, nor peace. He doesn't see the few, cherished frames of his smiling face, the genuine times of courage and connection. He doesn't see breakfast-for-dinner spite, nor the books that he never got to read--he sees nothing at all. Nothing, but terror in the fact that he has fought and won until he fought and lost and _this is where he loses_. It had been coming, coming, till it finally has, laid out naked and hauntingly true before him.

In those remaining moments, he can't conjure the faces that he loved with every piece of his heart, nor the ones he hated with every living cell. It's a revelation, to know keenly how you will die, and when, and be helpless against it all the same.

Death is like getting lost, somewhere, and never knowing the way back.

 

-

 

Glass, that’s what he had seen. On the floor, on the bed, on his little brother’s face.

Glass, cast like shadows, thrown into Jason’s eyes like light, dead light.

“It’s okay,” he remembers saying, while staring into those glass eyes with stones in his chest, despair a crack across his bruised lips.

“It’s okay,” he says, and doesn’t believe it.

“Dick,” his brother says, cracks. Hope breaks in his mouth. He sounds so brittle.

“I’ve got you.” Dick says, as he catches his brother’s pieces. He isn’t sure if Jason hears him over the breaking glass, hearts.

 

\--

 

He wakes up to an empty room.  

Jason notes that he is not dead, and that he is not in a casket.

The monitor hums somewhere near him, sounding out each heartbeat like some cruel joke, or reminder. He lays there for a while, caught like a moth in the stillness. Jason doesn’t try to see through the darkness.

It takes longer to move.

When he does, he feels nothing. There is no pain that confronts him, no anger that captures him. Jason breathes, and his chest feels missing. _Morphine_ , his brain helpfully supplies, to explain the lack. There is no other legal painkiller that still had definitive effects on him. (He briefly wonders who knew about his tolerances.) He remembers. (He had wanted this invulnerability, when Talia first overdosed him--so that Jason Peter Todd wouldn't make the same mistake his mother had. He regrets it, sometimes.)

It feels automatic, the way he tries to leave the bed. The impulse to live is ingrained in him, like it had been divined in fire--divined, and doomed.

 

\---

 

It shouldn’t matter, the way he wakes.

The way he wakes: perfectly still and silent on the bed (like a corpse on a slab, like a child in a closed coffin).

It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

 

\---

 

“This feels like deja vu,” Jason tells the darkness, absentmindedly, unsurprised by his cracked throat, his splintered body. His life a lifetime in repeat. Five years is long enough to become uniquely acquainted with this series of events.

A short laugh enters the room like a cut. “The part where you die, or the part where you come back to life?”

Not so alone, then.

The voice takes shape next to him, its sarcasm not nearly as rare as the accompanying dryness.  

“Both work.” Nothing is obligated to be seen in the dark, and yet Jason still manages to feel naked.

Dick doesn’t answer. Silence rises, spreads itself over the space between them like breath over skin. The absence of sound is acute. Jason hears it resound across the years of his life; tolling, tolling, taking.

This is how it should be, isn’t it? An continuity of pain. Or oblivion.   

 

\---

 

He had stopped breathing.

When Dick had barged into the room, all pale eyes and naked heart, Jason was tucked into the corner, folding in on himself. Hands clasped over his eyes, mouth open, chest heaving, a sickly sheen of sweat coinciding with the red, merging across a white body.

He vividly remembers the wheezing, the chattering of teeth against teeth. Bone against bone. As if the boy’s very soul were creaking open.

Then Jason’s chest stops moving.

His breath fades, mouth closing, taking a dream with it.

That’s when Dick screams.

 

\---

 

“You weren’t breathing,” his brother says. Jason stares into the darkness. Falling apart. His courage is a thread, nude and dead.

“I figured that out,” he says back. He’d die, again and again, and come back, more lost than the last.

“You held your breath.” The voice is mournful static, distilled in pain or regret, Jason can’t tell. The words breathe like gentle accusations, every realization a finger pointed at the trauma, at all the hurt glaring from inside him. He feels gutted. He is.

“Yes.” Jason says. He does not confess it--only answers simply, _yes_ , _this is how it is, brother dear, see my pieces?_ Admitting has never done him any good.

He hears a sharp breath, a sound that stings at his ears, his mind. The air moves. Jason feels it all passing through him; his body is an impartial husk, the nothingness he hosts leaking, oozing, contaminating. When did he become so foreign?

A touch at his knuckles startles him. He recoils, before realizing later that his body hadn’t followed. Jason figures it’s fair to feel disgusted for Dick’s sake, for that warmth which is so readily offered.

The man is unfortunate to have a brother like him, to have someone who breathes like they bleed--one who lives like a wound.

 

\---

 

His fingers are cold. Dick wants to bring fire back into them.

 

\---

 

The touch anchors Jason, in this room that still vaguely resembles a pit, a void, a casket. Dick’s presence has always been a less obtrusive one, and more wanted than Jason would say.

“Has it always been like this?”

The question is a tiny prick at the precarious footing Jason had achieved over these long years of silence. Silence that drowns, suddenly, like an uproar of rain and thunder, the stillness rendered apart till quiet remains. The kind of quiet that waits for you. It slips through the cracks, falls upon them like splinters.

“Yes,” Jason says, because falling is easy. Carving himself to bone necessitates fatal intimacy, and his tenacity has long worn.

(He isn’t strong enough--not anymore, if he ever had been. He doesn’t remember.)

 

\---

 

Yes, to all those missing years, all that vacant time and empty places.

 

\---

 

“I usually only have attacks. They don’t last long, couple of minutes tops.” Jason says, because if someone is to know, it might as well be Dick Grayson. “Haven’t had a breakdown for a while.” A breath. “Not one this severe, anyway.”

Speaking of it is odd, as if he is expelling it from himself, suspending the truth over his head like a noose. _Look_ , he seems to say, _look at my brokenness_.  

Jason wishes he could see his brother, see the desperation he has made of him, of them all.

“It’ll be alright.” Dick says, later, softly and as carefully as he can manage. His brother says it like a promise, like it’s absolute, when it has been proven wrong so, so many times.

 

\---

 

Dick says it this time with conviction.

It’ll be alright because he’ll make it that way.

(They have to.)

 

\---

 

“Dick,” says Jason, “I hurt you and Alfred.” _Again_ , he doesn’t say.

The grip on his knuckles tightens, before, “You didn’t.”

Jason lets out a hoarse scoff, ridden with all of his self-loathing, his grief. “Not this time,” he says. “Not yet.” _I will_ , and Jason knows this. This, he can promise.

There's a sharp intake of breath near him, and the force on Jason's hand is insistent when his brother speaks, restrained, “You're not who you think you are, Jay.”

“And I'm not who you think I am, dickie,” echoes the other. The image of a man falling from a balcony, of knives and guns and red hands, flicker through the dark. “I’m not good. Whatever that is.”

“You saved me,” his brother says, as though self-sacrifice would discharge him from all his faults, all his mistakes.

“My ability to make dumb decisions doesn’t redeem me.”  

“It doesn’t have to. You’re more than that.”

Exasperation fills the space where anger should be. “I’m _not_.” The feeling shakes him from the silence, and Jason hangs onto it, betting on it, frustration a light in his chest--“How the fuck do you not understand that?”

 

\--

 

He thinks he isn’t worth it. He thinks this is a ruse.

 

-

 

“I don’t.” There’s something jagged to Dick’s voice when he speaks again, a grating sharpness to his words that wasn’t there before. “I don’t understand why you think you are worse for this.”  

Jason closes his eyes, “it doesn't matter how many times I save you.”

“You aren't a martyr waiting to happen.”

A breath, a shudder, and the memory of rubble and steel beams pass through him. (Severe head trauma. Fractured skull. Flash burns, shattered sternum, collapsed lung, at least forty other fractures.)

“No,” murmurs Jason, “it kills me all the same.”

He’s read the reports. He’s felt it, had died with those broken places, had come alive in pieces. He had died. Like a whim, buried and mourned and resurrected, _his life like a whim_.

“Jay,” his brother says, and he says it as if it were a jagged thing. “You have.” He takes a breath that rattles in the air. “You have _never_ been dead to us.”

Bruce’s face was sealed off that night.

Jason had wanted to deprive him of his cowl--the thin line that separated them, distinguished their histories. The knife had slit through it easily, easily enough for Jason to rip it away, so he could see how the man would look when he bared his own. Jason had seen his eyes, the crisp blue dilated when Bruce saw him for the first time--and Jason had watched him say his name, the pebble in the man’s voice, _Jason_ pried open like an old wound. Gritted, as if Bruce were dragging it from where he had left it--from the reports, the headlines, the cave, the grave, _April 27th._

This is not about anger, not really. 

Jason stares into the blackness, glad for its presence. “I know. I’ve got my own little memorial, don’t I.”

“No,” in disbelief, a solemn forlorn thing. " _No_ ," and then Dick is hissing it, the words seething from his lips, “You don’t know. You came back, you aren’t fucking dead. You are-” A small, small heave; a cold gathering of nerves.

“You are here, Jason.” His voice shakes, but holds. The ends crack, flay, and Dick repeats it as if to revive it, “you are here.”   

 "I know," Jason says, a silence undone. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: There's this. Contradiction in Jason's existence, and I don't mean how all humans are walking paradoxes but. There's this misalignment in his continuity--he was Never Supposed to Die (literal quote from Batman: Under the Red Hood), but he did, and he left in pieces and when people see him it's like staring into the face of a memory? In so many ways? A Lived Experience, but a dead one, like you had been there once but can't return to it ever again. You know him but you don't, like a face superimposed by another so similar but yet so different. It must be so jarring. This must sound so cliche. Jason is made up of loose ends. He never did come back. There's something lost in him. 
> 
> Original Endnote:  
> I worked this chapter until it had honest to god gone stale. It was like handling a moldy brain baby at some point.  
> This was initially written entirely from Jason's POV, but that got old real fast, apparently. So, Dick. His POV helps me breathe better? I think? Also, it was only fair, in the aftermath of chapter 2. I hope it worked. I will be dabbling in different POVs from here on out.  
> This chapter is short bc it's informally split into two parts.


End file.
